Dragonmaw Retreat: A Custom Dungeon

I would describe my early dungeon experiences in Turtle WoW as "okay" for a Vanilla environment - neither worse than nor significantly improved compared to playing on official Classic servers. I knew that they had added entirely new dungeons to the world though, and I was very curious about those. I became aware of the first of these being called Dragonmaw Retreat, located in the Wetlands and designed for characters around level thirty.

As I was slowly getting the hang of the way the automated group finder without teleportation worked, I made a point of only putting myself in the queue when I was at least vaguely in the vicinity of the dungeon and not doing anything that couldn't easily be interrupted, so that I could pack up and start legging it to the instance at a moment's notice. I had picked up several quests for Dragonmaw Retreat by the time I got there and was very intrigued to find out what awaited me.

The healer in my first run warned me that it was going to be hard, and at the start of my second run someone cautioned everyone that the dungeon was quite long, wanting to double-check that all party members had sufficient amounts of time for the run. It wasn't all trepidation though: the aforementioned healer in run #1 also gushed about how cool and beautiful the dungeon was, comparing its vibe to Lord of the Rings.

The inspiration for that remark was hard to miss, considering we were soon climbing a long flight of stairs reminiscent of the way the Bridge of of Khazad-dûm was portrayed in the Fellowship of the Ring movie.

I was pretty impressed by the dungeon in general. Mind you, to me as someone who's spent way too much time in the vanilla World of Warcraft at this point, it was still quite obviously custom content that didn't quite have Blizzard's level of artistic polish: Everything seemed just a tad too big, too straight, too symmetrical and simply lacking in detail (in a way this exercise has given me a new appreciation for just how much work Blizzard's artists put into these things) - but it wasn't off by much, and I could imagine a more casual visitor who's unfamiliar with many of WoW's dungeons perhaps being unable to tell that this wasn't in the original game.

Lord of the Rings comparisons aside, the dungeon's general vibe reminded me a lot of Lower Blackrock Spire, with a dashing of Blackrock Depths sprinkled into the mix perhaps. At one point we tried to jump across a gap in the stairs, but only the healer and I made it, while everyone else landed on a ledge underneath. When trying to get down to their level, both the healer and I then missed that jump and ended up going splat on the ground below, followed by a corpse run back... I thought that was very authentic to the Vanilla WoW experience for sure.

Difficulty-wise, everything hit very hard, as noted in my last post about how dungeons feel kind of overtuned on Turtle, but oddly enough I didn't mind here at all. I guess it felt more disruptive in the Deadmines, which I've run so many times that I'm very familiar with what to expect. With this being new content, I had no preconceived notions of what it should be like, and it was easy enough to accept that mobs hit hard so you have to pull carefully, which to be honest tends to be my personal MO most of the time anyway.

The bosses were all fairly straightforward affairs with usually just one real mechanic each, e.g. an add summon or a fear on a cooldown. (They also had voice lines, and one orc in particular had such an over-the-top death gurgle, it made me laugh out loud.) The biggest challenge was usually just to get to the boss without accidentally pulling additional trash, and honestly that's kind of how I feel like it should be in a Vanilla environment. I don't know why the Blizzard devs seemed so enamoured with stuffing the updated fights in Season of Discovery with extra mechanics (which were usually still too boring for retail raiders, but disproportionally demanding compared to Vanilla content). 

Speaking of just getting to each boss though, another thing that was interesting was that the last two bosses were hidden behind a locked gate, and to unlock it you needed to create a key from two fragments found within a dungeon. One can be looted from a chest and the other is a guaranteed green drop from one of the earlier bosses. In my first run, everyone greeded on the green drop but we didn't keep track of who won it, and when we got to the gate, everyone insisted that they hadn't been the one who won the item. This meant we had to abandon the dungeon at that point as we couldn't proceed to the last two bosses.

I initially thought that perhaps this key was a temporary item that you had to assemble every run, kind of like the head on a pike in Lower Blackrock Spire, but later I learned that no, it actually translates into a permanent key, as on my second run the tank already had it and told us not to worry about the drops, which I thought was interesting. The key fragments also don't bind and can be bought and sold on the auction house, though you need to be inside the dungeon to assemble them.

The last bit of the dungeon hidden behind that gate was definitely the most interesting and impressive part of the experience, as you end up in this giant hallway in which a corrupted red dragon patrols, and you need to sneak around and kill six enchanters around the room to bring down his 95% damage reduction shield. That definitely felt very vanilla.

The very last boss turned out to be Zuluhed the Whacked, which made me go "oh, I know this guy", though it took me a moment to recall that in official WoW lore, this particular orc leader went to Outland and enslaved the Netherwing there. Not sure it's an upgrade for him to become a mid-level dungeon end boss instead, but it was a cool reveal nonetheless.

Also, shoutout to Hoodedmon the troll shaman, who was our tank on the second run and did a bang-up job both with the tanking itself as well as providing general leadership and explanations of what to do. He was also the first shaman tank I encountered on Turtle WoW, which wasn't that new a concept to me considering they were a big hit in Season of Discovery, but I hadn't realised that specialisation was available on Turtle WoW as well. 

Turtle WoW: A Different Stonetalon & Wetlands

I mentioned in my last post about Turtle WoW that I set myself the goal to level up a bit in order to be able to explore more of their custom content. Their next full custom zone was designed for you to be around level 30, but according to their Wiki there were new sub-zones and quest hubs to be found in several lower-level zones as well, so I made it my priority to spend my time in the twenties questing in Stonetalon Mountains and the Wetlands. Both are zones that I'm reasonably fond of and very familiar with, but I'll also admit that their original versions didn't exactly contain a huge number of quests, so they seemed like interesting candidates for expansion.

Let's start with Stonetalon. This is a zone that I don't think I spent a lot of time in back in original Vanilla (I just remember a more experienced friend warning me that the Scorched Vale was a death trap) but at least from Classic onwards I became very fond of it as a more quiet retreat from the crowds. It feels like a bit of a backwater zone for both factions (though more so for Alliance) and there just isn't a whole lot going on.

By that I don't just mean that there aren't a lot of quests, but that the map as a whole is pretty empty because so much of it is just assumed to be uninteresting mountains (which we didn't really get to see from ground level). It's telling that when Blizzard rebuilt Kalimdor to be fully three-dimensional for Cataclysm, they added a whole bunch of new points of interest to the Stonetalon map and still also ended up creating quite a lot of minimally textured mountainside with nothing going on because there was just so much unused terrain in that zone.

I'm leading with all of this to say that this zone is prime real estate for anyone wanting to expand on it in Classic+ style, as it's not that far-fetched for a bit of mountainside to come down to reveal additional valleys to explore. In the case of Turtle WoW, I found a narrow path up even further up the mountain from Stonetalon Peak, leading me to a Horde troll base that I couldn't get a good view of because high-level guards were blocking all entry. (I could eventually glimpse a bit more of it from the back of a hippogryph, as the flight path to Stonetalon Peak goes right over it.) It's been a long time since I stood at the edge of a Horde town, wondering just what the other faction gets up to over there. (It's probably not that exciting, but the point is that I don't know, and the unknown is fascinating!)

I later also found another, smaller new Horde town belonging to the Horde-aligned goblins - just how many hubs do they need to have in one zone? To the east, my eyes went wide when I discovered that the mountainside above the Grimtotem villages had been conquered by giant brambles, accompanied by quillboar spilling in from the Barrens. Again, it looked like the Horde had some quests to do there.

For Alliance there was actually surprisingly little to do and I mostly ended up doing old quests while I was there exploring. There was a new Venture Co. area carved into the western mountains where I got given a few tasks to do, so that was something. I also really liked the new mine shaft they opened up not far off Stonetalon Peak, since it wasn't very deep but had two guaranteed tin ore spawns inside.

The Wetlands were a very different experience, with most of the zone largely unchanged. To the east there's a new dungeon called Dragonmaw Retreat near Grim Batol, but since that seemed to be designed for around level 30 as well, I didn't go there until I was somewhat higher level. (There will be a post about it!) However, there was also a whole new sub-section of the zone to the south-west, where a steep mountain path just south of Menethil led up to a new dwarf town called Dun Agrath, with an adjacent human village called Hawk's Vigil.

While the main quests in the Wetlands were largely the same old, same old, I was given several breadcrumbs to go up to these new settlements, which filled me with a lot of anticipation. However, when I finally went there, Dun Agrath offered me exactly one quest to kill a few raptors down the hill and that was it. I stuck my nose into every building, and it all looked very pretty and interesting, with plenty of named NPCs you could chat with, but no quests. I'm honestly still a bit baffled by that. Again, I'm not saying every square foot of terrain has to be filled with activities, but what's the point of creating a whole (albeit pretty) sub-zone and then not adding anything to do in it?

The human settlement of Hawk's Vigil was better in that regard, even if whoever created it clearly liked Harry Potter a bit too much based on all the NPC names. (I know, Blizz has always had references to other properties in their games, but a whole town of people with last names from Harry Potter is a bit on the nose.) As there were no hostile mobs nearby, all the quests were of the "go talk to someone" variety, which made for an interesting change of pace.

Some of them sent me quite far afield, which at first made me sigh a bit - everyone hates these fetch quests that make you travel to another continent, right? Why make more of those? But then I thought nah, that's not fair, depending on the story these can be quite memorable so let's see where this goes. One chain ultimately had me exorcising a demon from a lumberjack after doing several slightly questionable things to get to that point, and the other had me hunt down information about the dark past of a guy new to the town and awarded a pretty nice piece of gear at the end. (I did feel a little weird killing the guy. They were clearly going for something similar to the quest chain that ends with "The Attack!" in Stormwind Keep, but that quest has you catching the bad guys in the act, while this chain has a lot of bad things to say about the person you're supposed to kill, but he just kinda sits there in his tent at the edge of town minding his own business, which made me feel a bit bad.)

Anyway, I was definitely more intrigued than I'd expected, even by these relatively minor additions to two zones I know well. I think the additions to Stonetalon felt more natural than those to the Wetlands (there wasn't even as much as a footpath leading up to Dun Agrath; if you didn't already know it was there you'd have no reason to assume that there was anything new down that way), but they were fun to explore either way. And honestly, even the old content felt refreshed by the uncertainty of never quite knowing whether an NPC wouldn't suddenly have a new additional quest or something.

Enjoyable WoW Videos on Exploration

One of the things that sometimes frustrate me about WoW is that in spite of how huge it is, I find it quite difficult nowadays to find like-minded people who enjoy the game in a similar way to me - not even necessarily because I need more people to play together, but just to chat and occasionally exchange some thoughts. There are tons of WoW content out there, but so much of it is just ruthlessly streamlined for clicks and monetisation: guides on how to play, what to do when the next patch drops, 10 reasons why whatever Blizzard is doing next is a terrible idea.

I'm not saying those things are bad or shouldn't exist (well - maybe that last category), but I yearn for more people to just share their love of this virtual world, bits of silliness, and just what they are getting up to in game. So I wanted to highlight three YouTube channels that do scratch that itch for me to some degree, in case there are others looking for the same.

(Wow)crendor

Crendor is actually an old hand at WoW YouTube content as he became well-known for his goofy machinimas around Wrath of the Lich King and was one of the first WoW YouTubers that I'm aware of that managed to turn his hobby into a job. He branched out into other games, sold merch etc. but unlike many others, he never gave me the vibe of having fully "sold out". (Look, I don't think there's anything wrong with making a living off making YouTube videos or other content, but let's not pretend that depending on it for your livelihood doesn't change your incentives and behaviour to some degree.) There's a reason his avatar is a sloth, and his attitude has always remained that he wants to be chill and just do what's fun.

He's produced lots of different WoW content in that vein over the years, but the series that's my personal favourite and that still gets regular updates is "Pointless Top 10". In this, he picks a random thing in the world (of Warcraft), whether it's caves, mailboxes or rivers and creates a top ten list of his favourites. I always love these because they tend to highlight weird little details to me that I missed and teach me more about parts of Azeroth that I'm maybe less familiar with, all in a casual tone that includes all kinds of silly tangents as well.

Jediwarlock

Let me just start by saying that I immediately considered this guy's channel name a good sign as he clearly likes both WoW and Star Wars, like I do! I think the first video of his that I saw was probably "The Greatest Adventure in World of Warcraft" about a year ago, in which he talks about the storyline that winds its way through the first 25 levels or so of the human starting zone in WoW Classic.

I've since come to enjoy other lore videos of his, specifically for the way he talks about it. I feel like many more popular lore YouTubers are very focused on the grand design and the lives of major NPCs, but Jediwarlock talks about the quests we actually do as players, what we see in the zones, NPC dialogue and how it all ties together to create a certain experience for the player (in Classic).

Lani Gray

Lani is a very new YouTuber, but by chance I ended up seeing her very first video about Azuremyst Isle when it had only about 100 views, and I just immediately loved it. Her goal seems to be to document levelling through WoW (the modern version that is, not Classic) and talking about everything she sees along the way. She talks about every zone in incredible detail, including things like the personalities of different NPCs, environmental storytelling, and just what kind of feelings the zone invokes in her. She does all this with an incredible fangirlish energy that I love and that feels like a friend just telling you about some new cool thing they saw and adored. Naturally she doesn't have that many videos up yet, but if what I just described sounds like your cup of tea at all, consider giving one of her videos a watch.

Turtling On

I've honestly become quite enthralled with Turtle WoW. I wasn't exaggerating when I compared the experience to 2019 Classic, including the urge to log in whenever I can, even if it's only to take care of one small task at a time.

After I initially completed the high elf starter zone, the thought of going back to the same old content that I've done many times before seemed a bit underwhelming. There doesn't currently seem to be a unique new quest hub or zone for Alliance characters in the low teens, presumably because so many people go to Westfall during that time anyway. However, based on the Turtle WoW Wiki, new custom content seemed within reach if I could only knock out another ten levels or so, which I figured shouldn't be that hard this early in the levelling process.

So I travelled around several of the classic 10-20 zones, doing a few select quests in each one, and being fascinated by where random new quests showed up mixed in with the old ones. In Elwynn I befriended a sheep called Lulu for example, which then became my pet. And if you ever thought it was odd that Marshal Dughan asked you to explore the Jasperlode Mine just to then not follow up on what you find in there - well, on Turtle WoW he actually asks you to go back there and kill those giant spiders.

I also found new stand-alone quests in places where they felt like very natural additions, such as the dwarven fisherman down by Loch Modan asking you to kill some threshadons, or the first night elf house you come across when going down to Ashenvale now having a night elven couple in it that ask you to check in on a furbolg and hunt some wolves. Again, I could nitpick about things like odd word choices and typos in the quest text, but I loved that it just felt right that there was something to find in those places now.

There were other random changes to the world to notice. For example Stormwind has the harbour that was added in Wrath, and the boat from Auberdine to Menethil was rerouted from the latter to go to Stormwind instead - which means no more Wetlands death runs for night elves, but also makes Darnassus as a capital way more connected so it doesn't feel too bad to go there now. You can even do your auction business there without it being too annoying because the devs added a mailbox next to the auction house building, meaning it's no longer necessary to run all the way back to the bank all the time.

Fishing has been another interesting exercise. Fishing has always had the reputation of being a decent moneymaker, but my experience in WoW Classic has always been that on the Classic megaservers, there's too much competition for pools and it's hard to claim any for yourself. Turtle WoW must have increased the spawn rates for fishing pools massively, because even though the server is incredibly busy and I do see people fishing all over the place, there are always more pools to grab. This doesn't seem to have hurt demand either: I had about one gold to my name when I decided to stop at the Auberdine docks to fish from some pools that I noticed there - a few hours later I was up to ten gold and could buy myself a 16-slot bag (which was only a fraction of the price you'd be charged on official Classic servers).

They clearly made other changes as well - for example I keep finding Sagefish along the coast, which is purely a freshwater fish in regular Classic. Also, the lowest rank Rumsey Rum which you can find in certain pools is usually vendor trash, but for some reason I could sell it for ten silver a pop on Turtle. 

Not everything's great, as there are also bugs with fishing - I was unable to fish in Crystal Lake for some reason, and at other times I would catch something but would be unable to loot it and the fish would end up lost. Still, overall fishing has been fun and a great boon.

Chucking things on the auction house has also felt better than it has in a while, again thanks to small changes I noticed compared to "pure" Vanilla. The maximum listing time has been increased from 24 to 72 hours, and while I haven't done the maths, listing fees seem drastically reduced compared to regular Vanilla, with many low-level items not having any at all, which actually makes it viable to throw up low-level crafting mats for a few copper without making a loss. I've been kind of impressed with how materials are simultaneously abundant and affordable, but still sufficiently in demand that you can actually make a small profit off everything you sell (which is once again a contrast to official Classic, where I remember the leather market for example sometimes being so flooded that you were better off just vendoring it all).

At level 18 I could set out to the Darkmoon Faire to get the low-level turtle mount, which matches the server's name. It doesn't actually speed you up a lot, but around level 20 when you start having to travel around a lot more, it still feels good to be able to go even a little bit faster. (Plus it actually swims if you walk it into a lake or river!) I thought that was quite an elegant solution to making travel just a little bit easier without devaluing the level 40 mount.

I also really liked the quest text for this one by the way, as I thought it was very clever and fit well into the existing lore. I never really thought about the fact that Torta and Tooga in Tanaris are talking tortoises and how odd that is even in Azeroth, yet nobody ever remarks on it. It seemed appropriate that Silas Darkmoon would be fascinated by magical talking turtles!

I thought I'd also queue for a quick Deadmines, because I always love me some Deadmines. I actually got a group instantly, but the experience was not at all what I expected. Four of us arrived at the dungeon before the tank, so I thought we could at least start pulling some mobs in the tunnel, right? As a hunter with a pet I was generally able to take a same-level elite as long as I took a bit of care. Not here, though! The very first mob murdered my pet in only a few hits and then got me too.

It reminded me of how when WoW Classic came out, it turned out that Vanilla private servers were way overtuned in terms of difficulty compared to the real thing, just because everyone remembered things being way harder than they had objectively been at the time. Apparently the Turtle WoW devs never revised that tuning for dungeons, whether intentionally or by mistake, which meant that our progress was very slow as the tank took an absolute beating on every pull, making the healer go almost oom. I don't really know how I feel about that. I don't like people rushing through dungeons, so making them harder in order to force people to slow down should be right up my alley, but it's the freaking Deadmines, your very first dungeon as Alliance - it just felt way over the top.

I also came to learn that the Turtle WoW devs had added two new rooms with new bosses to this dungeon. The first one was a Defias alchemist guy, and I didn't get to see the second one at first as the group wiped, people got separated, and then we disbanded. Not what I expected of the Deadmines! (I did later do another run that actually managed to complete the dungeon, but it also included a wipe and once again felt quite slow and tedious, even with everyone being quite high level compared to the mobs in the instance.)

Also, another small note on community: I once again got confirmation that there are a number of guilds and groups that are just super dedicated to Vanilla and will always go where it's currently at its liveliest. I spotted someone in Stormwind who had "Group Therapy" as his guild tag and went "Wait, like the guild I was in during early Classic six years ago?" I actually whispered them to ask and they said they didn't know for sure whether it was the same guild since they were new, but they directed me to another, more senior member who seemed to at least confirm that it was likely the same guild. Small world!

There may be no consensus about what an ideal "Vanilla Plus" should look like, but I can see why many players feel like they've found it on Turtle WoW, and it certainly seems to scratch that itch for me as well.

My First Dungeon on Turtle WoW (Was Messy)

I felt that my first dungeon run on Turtle WoW was worthy of its own post, because it turned into quite an unexpected adventure (in both good and bad ways).

To set the scene, I noticed early on that Turtle's UI included the little dungeon finder eye that was added during Wrath of the Lich King as an icon on the edge of the mini map. I clicked on it to make sure that it was indeed what I thought it was, and while there was a second tab for manual group finding, the primary one was indeed an automated dungeon queue, though it required level 13 to access. I thought to myself that this was a bit odd and un-Vanilla-like, but then it's not an unusual thing for private servers to mix and match different expansion features, so I just shrugged it off.

When my little hunter hit level 13, the option to queue up for Ragefire Chasm opened up, so I signed up for that. (If you have experience playing on Turtle WoW, you may already be able to guess where this is going.) Somewhat to my surprise, I was in the queue for over an hour before anything happened. I mean, I know that wait times as a damage dealer are always longer, but the low level open world zones had been plenty busy and I couldn't quite fathom why seemingly none of these people would be queueing for dungeons.

I was inside a cave in Elwynn Forest when I finally got the pop-up telling me that a group had been formed. I excitedly pressed the "Let's do this!" button and quickly found myself in a group with four Horde characters. Now, I'd read some stuff about cross-faction play being a thing on Turtle, so that part wasn't really a surprise, however what was a surprise - and an unpleasant one at that - was the lack of a teleport to the dungeon.

So here I was, a level 13 Alliance player in Elwynn Forest, with the rest of my group waiting for me in Orgrimmar. Oh. OH.

I immediately apologised, telling them that I was new to the server and had expected this automated group finder to work like Wrath's, and that it probably wasn't worth waiting for me to get over there. I felt profoundly embarrassed, and part of me wanted to quit group right there, but I also hate leaving a group I only just joined, so I kind of hovered for a bit to await the party's judgement. Maybe Turtle WoW also had summoning stones? Someone (I think it was the tank but I'm not 100% sure now) said that it was fine and that they could probably wrangle a higher-level warlock into summoning me over there.

Still feeling a bit sheepish and uncertain about what to do with myself now, I decided that the best course of action for me was to at least make a good faith attempt at legging it to Orgrimmar in the meantime, even if I was unlikely to get very far. When I arrived in Darkshore, I noticed some strange things happening to the group, with people leaving and re-joining repeatedly, until the whole party was suddenly disbanded - or at least, I was suddenly group-less.

I just figured that I'd been kicked after all and felt a little sad, even if I thought it was understandable. As I was already on the road, I kept running south in an attempt to at least make it to Astranaar, since I was already in the area. However, not soon after, I got a re-invite to the group, and this time it included a level 60 troll warlock who sent me a summon. I appeared in Orgrimmar in front of the RFC entrance and thanked everyone once again.

Aside from me, the group consisted of a bear druid tank, an undead mage, a goblin warlock and an undead priest healer. The mage handed out some water and we quickly seemed to be off to a good start inside the dungeon.

At one point a green cloak with +2 agility dropped, and since I was still wearing a white, I rolled need on it. I wasn't surprised that I didn't win, but I was surprised that the other person who had rolled need on it was the warlock. Still, I wasn't going to complain - for all I knew, classes might be working differently on this server and I had only just had a demonstration of how little I actually knew about how things worked around these parts.

However, the mage took note, was not pleased and asked the warlock why they were needing on everything. It was only then that I noticed that the lock had indeed also needed on other items such as random gems. "I'm a JC" was their defense, which I thought was pretty weak (especially since I was one too) but again I didn't say anything. The mage continued to argue and rant about it though, and the lock started passing on everything for a little while, though they later resumed rolling.

The mage then also started complaining that the lock was just on follow and not actually doing any damage. I couldn't tell whether that was true, but it did seem like they were mostly just ambling about and not casting any spells. Still, nobody was responding to these accusations at all, even when the mage started outright demanding that the group leader should just kick the warlock already. It was as if they were just shouting into a void.

We made it past the first boss, but on one of the trash pulls that followed, my hawkstrider pet suddenly shot off into another group of mobs around the corner. I've played Classic hunter for so long now and have had so many pet accidents, but I still don't know what caused this particular one, as he was not on aggressive and the mobs were around a corner and not even visible to me. Either way, the moment I saw what was happening I said "omg, I'm so sorry, I don't know why he did that". We tried our best, but sadly it was too many mobs at once and we wiped.

The mage made one last complaint about how the warlock was supposedly only auto-attacking, before calling us all the "worst classic group ever" and quitting the party. Everyone else cared about that about as much as they had cared about the person's previous complaints, which is to say nobody even commented on it in any way. We just ran back, revived, and then finished the rest of the dungeon just fine with the four of us who remained.

When we exited the instance, my hearthstone was still on cooldown, so I thought I'd take a look at this apparently cross-faction-friendly Orgrimmar, but I had barely taken two steps away from the instance portal when a guard ran up and one-shot me. So, uh... so much for that.

Nonetheless, I thought this was a very educational experience. I can see now why no Alliance players are queueing for RFC, and I'm not sure why the game would list it as a "recommended dungeon" when you're supposed to walk all the way to Org as an Ally. Considering my encounter with the guard, it seems unlikely that a full Alliance group would even be able to make it there without a lot of corpse-running.

The mage was a weird character because I could kind of understand their complaints (my pet mishap wiping the group was definitely worthy of some disdain I thought) but they were just... so angry about everything. It's RFC, man, and maybe that warlock is someone's kid or a complete newbie or whatever, no need to get quite so wound up about it.

Meanwhile, the druid tank was an absolute saint, organising the summon for me and also telling me "no worries" after I'd caused the wipe. The best and the worst of most Classic environments in a nutshell. 

I Decided to Try Turtle WoW Before It Shuts Down

Strictly speaking we don't know how soon it's going to happen (the server owners at least still seem to be in "we can totally do this" mode), but I did find myself thinking that if Turtle WoW does end up biting the dust in the near future... after everything that I've heard about it, I would like to at least have tried it myself, to see some of the things that people have been praising over the moon and form my own opinion.

So I downloaded a private server client for the first time in nearly a decade. (Don't give me the side eye, Blizz, my subscription is already paid up until next year.) On the plus side, with them offering the launcher right there on their own website, there was no faffing around with dodgy file sharing sites or editing realmlist.wtf files. However, it was also a reminder that a private server is still a private server with all the jank that entails, as I had to spend a fair amount of time dealing with errors and fiddling with settings until I had everything running smoothly. (In a similar vein, every single screenshot I took during my first play session was apparently lost as they wouldn't save properly unless I ran the client as administrator.)

One thing I was very impressed with though was the detailed list of server rules I had to agree to while signing up. I'm someone who likes clear rules, and I think that having some basic politeness standards for something that is supposed to be a relaxed, escapist space should not be controversial at all. Unfortunately we live in times where the argument of "free speech" is often abused to let pointless toxicity spread far and wide - when WoW players were asked to agree to a comparatively short and simple pop-up asking them to be nice a few years ago, there was a veritable uproar. So good on Turtle WoW for making it clear that good behaviour is not optional (and based on everything I've heard, they actually enforce these rules as well).

I created a blonde high elf because that seemed like a good way of diving straight into the custom content unique to the server. At first I was going to make her a paladin but then I saw that high elves get bonuses to their agility and bow skill, so I decided that I was clearly meant to create yet another hunter.

I was kind of impressed to find that the experience started with one of those fly-over introductions with a narrator explaining the race's background, even if the voice-over was done by a woman with a Russian accent. In a video about Turtle WoW from years ago, I'd seen newly created high elves simply get plopped down in Loch Modan with some starter quests around Farstrider Lodge. This was clearly outdated, as they now had their own starting zone called Thalssian Highlands, located north-west of the Plaguelands.

I will admit that after how much praise I'd seen heaped on the Turtle WoW devs for their custom content, I found it easy to immediately find things to nitpick. For example the first few quests I read were written in such incredibly purple prose, it actually made me laugh. (Though in fairness, later quests were not like that, so maybe the writers just thought that those particular characters should sound pompous and over the top.) More importantly though, the quest writers often seemed to forget that when you write quests for a game mode without quest tracking, you need to give some actual directions in the quest text. There were many occasions when this wasn't done and I was left slightly bewildered and confused after having been given instructions to kill some mobs without any idea of where to actually go.

It was difficult to find NPCs to repair my gear as most weapon and armour vendors didn't offer repairs like they would normally do in WoW. Guards seemed to be purely cosmetic and did absolutely no guarding. (My first death occurred when a higher-level mana wyrm attacked me on the road and a guard watched me die right next to him without offering any assistance.) Clickable quest items didn't despawn after I clicked them, so I often ended up clicking on them again without being able to loot anything, meaning I had to memorise which boxes or buckets I'd already interacted with.

The quest flow also seemed slightly off in general, as even though I picked up every quest I could find and killed plenty of mobs along the way, I was permanently slightly under-levelled for the next few quests I was given, and as a hunter without a pet... let's just say this was extremely painful and I died many times. (The issue was exacerbated by the all the mobs seemingly running too fast and having leashes that felt way too long for a starting zone - so any attempts to kite or simply run away from a fight were pretty much always unsuccessful as the mobs were impossible to outrun and would just chase me forever.)

Another thing that fascinated me about the quests in general was just how openly derivative many of them were, especially after the many comments I'd read about how Turtle WoW apparently understands better what defines Vanilla WoW than Blizzard does. "Come on," you might say, "it's kill-ten-rats kind of stuff, how much originality do you expect?" But I'm not talking about the tasks themselves - rather about the story and theming around them.

Every WoW starting zone has quests to kill some local wildlife, but the context varies. As a whole, each starting zone paints a picture of the culture your character belongs to, what its values are and what problems it faces. The blood elf starting zone is very different from the human starting zone, which is very different from the undead starting zone. What stood out to me about the high elf starting zone in Turtle WoW was that it seemed to lack a clear theme and felt more like some weird amalgamation of Elwynn Forest and Eversong Woods quests viewed through a fun house mirror: Here's the quest where some guy asks you to pick flowers for a girl he likes, here's the quest where an elf wants to throw a party and needs you to fetch supplies. Here's the quest with the vineyard where grapes have been abandoned in buckets and you need to fetch them. (Though oddly, no grapevines in sight - the implication seemed to be that they grow on the giant trees?)

All that just hit a nerve with me because I hate the idea that people might think that the gold standard for Classic+ should be to just retell the exact same stories over and over again. It's like those people who don't like anything Star Wars if it doesn't have a lost Skywalker finding the Force in it.

Anyway... that was a bit of tangent. Let's talk professions! I initially wanted to learn skinning and leatherworking, but the skinning trainer in town didn't seem to exist. I saw a jewelcrafting trainer nearby and went "Ooh, they have that here?", so I trained that and mining instead. In an interesting twist, it's not the same as Burning Crusade jewelcrafting. From what I've seen so far, the basic rings are present but have had their recipes changed, and there are a lot of new and different recipes as well.

Unfortunately, secondary professions seem to have gotten the short end of the stick in comparison, at least based on my experience in this zone. While there was a fishing trainer, the fishing skill requirement was way too high for a starter zone and fish were always getting away from me even with a lure applied. There were no fishing pools along the coast either. Cooking and first aid were likewise trainable in the vicinity, but none of the animals actually dropped meat that could be cooked, and apart from a handful of ghost mobs in the north-western corner of the map, nothing seemed to drop linen for first aid either.

I could go on and on... but despite these nitpicks and annoyances - I had fun. There was definitely something very refreshing and exciting about being in a vaguely Vanilla-like starting zone without having any idea of what awaited me. I loved not knowing what I'd see next whenever I crested a hill, or finding an unexpected quest giver inside a building. I quickly lost track of time while playing, and when I got up the next morning, I kept thinking about my little elf, eager to go back and play some more in a way I probably hadn't done since 2019's Classic launch.

For all the small details I noticed being off, there was still a lot to be impressed by, such as the fact that the whole zone of Thalassian Highlands is an original creation (even if it clearly recycles a lot of assets from Eversong), including the composition of original zone music. And there are other loving touches, such as that they updated the Vanilla loading screens for Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms to include high elves and goblins. The Turtle WoW creators clearly have a lot of love for Vanilla; there are just gaps in the details.

At one point when I got tired of dying constantly due to my low level, I ran towards what looked like the local docks on the map, and jumped onto the first boat that arrived to take me somewhere else, anywhere else. I ended up in Auberdine, and found that someone had pitched a tent outside the inn. I had heard about these, so I stood under it, and within the course of five minutes or so, I saw my rested XP shoot up by about half a level. While I soon hearthed back home, that restedness helped me to finally catch up a bit in levels, so thanks, anonymous tent-builder.

This seems like a good point to mention community. Again, this is something that I'd heard a lot of praise for before, so I was admittedly a bit confused when for my first few levels I couldn't get anyone to talk to me. By that I mean that people would group up for a quest and cooperate, but I would literally get zero reply to anything I said. I was starting to wonder whether there was some hidden chat restriction for low-level characters or something. I think I was around level 9 when a friendly mage finally talked to me while we briefly grouped up for a quest to kill murlocs. They even offered to continue questing together, but unfortunately I had to log off just after that. The only other verbal interaction I've had since then was some random whispering me to compliment me on my "thicc elf booty". All in all, I would rate that as similar to playing on a Blizzard PvE server before they merged everything into the mega servers - neither notably better nor worse. But then, you can't really have a non-megaserver experience in most of the official Classic versions anymore, so...

After I'd completed all the quests in Thalassian Highlands (as far as I could tell), I tried to do some research on what else might be interesting to check out, whether there was another custom zone I could go to at my level. As it turns out, there aren't actually as many of them as one might have expected after all the hype, and Thalassian Highlands is supposed to be one of the better ones. There do however seem to be a lot of smaller changes all over the place, and I have already encountered a few new quests sprinkled in here and there among the original ones from the existing zones.

I don't know how much time I will invest in this exploration (never mind how much I will have before the server potentially goes bye-bye) but there'll be at least one more post on the subject, about me trying to do my first dungeon and it being a very weird experience.

Could Turtle WoW Be a Catalyst for Classic+?

I was going to start my day doing something else today, but then I came across a hot bit of gossip late last night that I just had to write about first: that Blizzard is suing Turtle WoW. I'm sure I'm not the only one who immediately wondered whether this is going to be another Nostalrius situation.

But let's back up for a second for anyone who might be confused by what some or all of that means. To recap, Nostalrius was an incredibly popular Vanilla WoW private server that was active for a year from early 2015 to 2016. It purported to be not for profit and claimed to offer the most authentic recreation of Vanilla WoW out there. Despite its very short lifespan, it managed to attract an incredible amount of interest within that year, to the point that even mainstream media were starting to report on it. Blizzard eventually sent them a cease and desist, but also ended up inviting the developers over to their headquarters, and it's widely believed that the whole incident was what convinced Blizzard that there was a valid business case for them to release their own Classic servers, as they announced WoW Classic at BlizzCon the following year.

(I myself never played on the original Nostalrius, but I played on its direct competitor Kronos. Vanilla WoW was definitely "in the air" around that time, with the disappointing Warlords of Draenor making many yearn for the good old days.)

The initial release of WoW Classic took a sledgehammer to the private server scene, because most people were happy to just pay for easy access to the "real" thing. However, ten years later, things look a little different.

WoW Classic is still around of course, but it has evolved in ways that have once again started to put some people off. WillE just released a video the other day about how he thinks there are too many versions of Classic at the moment, and I've been thinking about writing my own take on the state of Classic for a while. Because while there are many versions of it, at the same time they haven't necessarily been what (at least some) people wanted. Players were given a chance to play Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and then these expansions were taken away from them again, so if either of these was what you really wanted out of WoW Classic, it was back to private servers for you. Season of Discovery was off to an incredibly strong start with the promise of offering "Vanilla with a twist" and then lost steam hard in its subsequent phases, just to end up in an awkward state of abandonment now, with no more active development planned.

People keep clamouring for "Classic Plus", a version of Vanilla WoW that should be permanent and receive continued active development like retail, but stay true to Vanilla somehow, even though you won't be able to find two people who agree on what exactly that means. In fairness, Blizzard has sent out more than one survey seemingly trying to find out what such a version of WoW could look like, but personally I'm still not convinced that they are really working on a permanent Classic+ as opposed to just the next seasonal server.

Either way, the point is that there is once again a gap in Blizzard's offerings that private servers have been happy to fill, and one of the most popular of these has been Turtle WoW. Unlike Nostalrius, this one has been more of a slow burn. Their website proudly states that they've been online since 2018, but I didn't really start hearing about them until a few years ago. YouTuber McDoubles has a whole playlist about him exploring TurtleWoW that was widely viewed and whose first video was posted roughly three years ago.

I've never played Turtle WoW myself - I'm not necessarily happy with everything Blizzard has done, but I'm also less invested at this point than I was, and ease of access and stability are more important to me - but I read and heard a lot about it. In recent months in particular, I couldn't watch a YouTube video about WoW Classic without the comments being flooded with "go play Turtle WoW" style comments, similar to how people were shouting about Nostalrius everywhere in 2015.

I'm not sure Turtle has become as popular as Nost was back then, but considering how long it's been up, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd had several hundred thousand sign-ups by this point as well, and it's clear that Blizzard was getting fed up with them. Unlike Nostalrius, Turtle WoW also hasn't been afraid to make money with a cash shop, and the lawsuit alleges that they may have made millions of dollars from it.

I'm kind of conflicted in terms of how I feel about this whole thing. Legally, Blizzard is obviously in the right (as they were with Nostalrius), and Turtle WoW's big cash shop shows that they weren't nearly as selfless about this whole thing as the Nostalrius team was. However, reading through the lawsuit and seeing the sheer amount of international cooperation required to run Turtle (defendants are alleged to be located in Russia, Germany, the US, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Romania and the Czech Republic) I can't help but also feel the passion of the people involved, even if they were making money off their product.

And there is a reason Turtle WoW got as popular as it has, in that they managed to tap into what at least a significant part of the player base wants out of Classic and that Blizzard doesn't currently provide. Noteworthy to me has been:

1. Their focus has been on PvE (when all the big private servers used to be PvP), levelling and the world. Their website states that they added two new raids, but there are way more improvements and additions made to the open world and lower-level zones, such as additional boat connections and countless new quest hubs, new world events and a new profession. This is in contrast to how with Blizzard, everything always seems to circle back to raiding, endgame and adding even more powerful gear. This was the big letdown of Season of Discovery for me personally.

2. In a time when big companies are constantly outsourcing and reducing staff with "soft skills", such as social media or customer service teams, Turtle WoW had a reputation for having actual human GMs and good moderation. I even heard complaints that their moderation was "too strict", which to me to be honest sounded like a good thing in the context of MMO general chat channels.

This is not to say that Turtle WoW was perfect or anything - what I heard about their cash shop sounded quite off-putting to me (you could buy bags, "transmog" and garish mounts to an extent that puts retail WoW to shame), but to be honest I was still kind of glad the project was there as a signal to Blizzard that there are people who care about things they don't currently offer.

With this lawsuit, it seems unlikely that Turtle WoW will survive for very long - while it's not impossible for a for-profit private server to continue operating in the face of legal threats if they route all their activities through just the right countries (Warmane has infamously been in operation for over a decade), I'm not sure the Turtle WoW team has what it takes to continue evading the law, especially as the details of the lawsuit seem to show that the owners have already been identified and tracked down in real life.

I think the best we can hope for is that the situation will create sufficient amounts of attention and community outcry to make Blizzard think hard about what it is that's missing from Classic right now to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people would rather sign up for and download a private server client than play their product.